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Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam

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Sean Anthony

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“In an important article, Angelika Neuwirth eloquently described the shortcomings of our field's insularity as a failure to situate the Qur'an in the "thought world" and "epistemic space" of Late Antiquity - a failure she diagnoses as rooted in the subconscious, but nonetheless persistent, tendency of modern scholarship to reproduce the premodern view of early Islamic history as momentous yet "foreign" and somehow outside and beyond the forces exerted by Late Antiquity on Western and European history.”

History Of Religion
Book:Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam
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“When Enlightenment thinkers naturalized Muhammad as a mere man rather than a demonic false prophet, they forged a humanistic intellectual environment that inexorably led to the naturalization of Moses and Jesus as men of history and of their times as well. Hence, the three founders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suddenly came to stand on par with one another in the humanists' imaginary, a parity and equilibrium that established the foundations of the very enterprise of the comparative study of religions.”

History Of Religion
Book:Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam
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“Several themes that are common in early non Muslim sources but far less so in sources from the Arabo-Islamic tradition feature prominently in al-Zuhrī’s account. For instance, al-Zuhrī portrays the ascendance of Muhammad’s followers: (1) as led by a new king (malik), or else as ushering in an era of new kingship/dominion (mulk); and (2) as primarily an ethnic dominion, being a rule not of a community of faithful believers (al-muʾminīn) but rather of “the circumcised people [al-khitān].” While this is not incompatible per se with early Islamic historiography, these themes deeply resonate with early Christian accounts of the rise of Islam, particularly in the Levant, which most often speak of the new Arab/Saracen rulers in terms a new dominion (Syr. malkūtā), not a new religion and hence just as often depict Muhammad and other early Muslim rulers as merely “kings” (Syr. malkē) and nothing more. The account of Ps.-Fredegar fits this pattern perfectly, inasmuch as it describes the “circumcised” conquerors in purely ethnic terms, designating them as either Hagarenes (Agarrini) or Saracens (Saracini), but displays no knowledge of Muhammad, his religion, or the religious convictions and motivations of the “Saracen” conquerors.”

History Of Religion
Book:Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam
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“The geography of faith had begun to shift profoundly with Islam—a religion that brought with it a renewed, robust vision of an empire of faith. It would also then fall to al-Zuhrī to be the new empire’s most eloquent and skillful articulator of its Islamic vision of the translatio imperii with the prophetic authority of Muhammad and his community at its center—reaffirming that with new faith came new dominion.”

History Of Religion
Book:Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam
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“Because the past shapes the present, responsible citizenship also requires some sense of history, an idea that applies particularly to the matter of religion. Too often public discussions of the religious dimensions of policy issues either overlook the past or concentrate on very recent years. But that shortened perspective makes it difficult to see what is new and what is not and which problems, such as climate change, economic disparity, and interreligious violence, are entangled in a longer past. We need a history that traces religion's role in the broad changes in ways of life, from foraging to farming to factories.”

CitizenshipHistory Of Religion
Book:Religion: A Very Short Introduction
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“Evangelicals simply cannot be identified immediately with the political right. Non- Anglican Protestants in Britain were long aligned with the political Left, and Australia’s left-wing parties have also enjoyed a measure of evangelical support. Canada’s major left-wing political organization, the New Democratic Party, came to prominence under the leadership of a Baptist pastor, Tommy Douglas.”

HistorySociologyEvangelismHistory Of ReligionEvangelicals
Book:Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction
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“A festival always takes place in the original time. It is precisely the reintegration of this original and sacred time that differentiates man's behavior during the festival from his behavior before or after it. For in many cases the same acts are performed during the festival as during nonfestival periods. But religious man believes that he then lives in another time, that he has succeeded in returning to the mythical Mud tempus.”

ReligionHistory Of Religion
Author:Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
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“The writer of history is a tragedian in a theatre of the absurd. Airy speculation is not the most tantalizing aspect of his study. Nothing frustrates more than the sight of dynamic hopes moving toward an inevitably disastrous end. The historian can see what the actors of the historical drama could at best suspect. History's basis is hindsight; but hindsight is also history's absurdity.”

HistoryHistoriansHistory Of Religion
Book:Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan
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